Having forgotten about it, I just found this in my book of notes (the one that lives in my lab coat pocket, and contains some of the wisdom I've gleaned this year from my clinical professors' experience):

Winter raises up her icy fist into the sunUnfurls her white and frozen fingers, one by oneUpon her palm there hesitates the frightened bird of SpringStill for just a momentThen takes wing.

4/8/05

What do I seek in poetry? I was reading Erica Jong, this morning, and in three successive poems she asked that question, without arriving at an end; she merely found a resting place along the journey.

Myself: I seek moments, not answers. Moments in which, through my writing, I may express myself unequivocally, perfectly, in the language of the soul. And why do I read it? To hear those voices, crying out in the darkness, each with its own vision and story and pathos, and know that I am not alone.

Alone, of course, is illusory. It is a fabrication we challenge ourselves with while alive. Yet, knowing this as I do, why have I committed so much of the beating heart of my life to the quest for understanding, union, moments of shining harmony with others? So many of my years have been wracked with that desire -- to live in perfect unity with another, that moment between breaths, forever. My friends and my lovers have paid for my fanaticism, as have I. May all the muses of the years keep me from throwing another love to the sacrificial fire.

"To succeed is always to fail. Arrival is death and traveling is eternal..." said J. Krishnamurti in the dedication at the beginning of Erica Jong's "At the Edge of the Body". And so I have become a traveler, on one long odyssey that will end with a final exhalation, perhaps a smile of recognition and welcome on my face.